Realignment chatter, usually contained to message boards, Twitter feeds and sports bars, made its way last week to the websites of respected publications like the Dallas Morning News and Kansas City Star .
The speculation is rooted in frustration within the Pac-12:
Frustration with the football postseason, the basketball postseason, the tepid success of the Pac-12 Networks and the lagging revenue (compared to other Power Fives).
Combine that state of play with accurate but less-than-complimentary comments from Arizona State athletic director Ray Anderson, and you have the uptick in chatter.
Only this time the narrative has flipped:
The Big 12, once on life support, is looking to grow. The Pac-12, once the aggressor (recall Texas, Oklahoma and the Pac-16) is vulnerable to poaching. Might the frustrated Arizona schools be there for the taking?
If so, the Big 12 would actually become the Big 12 and add heft, a major TV market and football inventory prior to the next round of Tier I media rights negotiations in the early 2020s?
In my experience, there are two rules of realignment:
No. 1: It’s never done until it’s done … and sometimes not even then.
No. 2: Everyone has an opinion, but only a handful of voices truly matter. And those voices rarely, rarely talk.
After mulling whether to address the latest buzz — it’s nothing more than that — I opted to publish this column in order to 1) remind fans of the oft-overlooked machinery behind realignment and 2) provide Hotline readers with a point of reference when the topic inevitably resurfaces in a few years.
From this vantage point, the situation is clear:
There is no chance … none, zero … of the Arizona schools jumping conferences prior to the next round of Tier I deals.
It might look enticing at the moment, with the Pac-12 floundering on the field/court and the Big 12 schools generating more annual revenue through conference distributions and local media rights.
(Pac-12 campuses received $30.9 million from the conference in FY17, while their Big 12 counterparts collected $34.3 million, plus varying seven-figure amounts from local TV deals.)
But never forget: Realignment doesn’t play out in the minutiae of year-to-year performance cycles; it unfolds on a broader canvass, one painted by university presidents, boards of regents and state politicians.
For the Arizona schools, jumping to the Big 12 doesn’t make sense.
For the Big 12, inviting the Arizona schools doesn’t make sense.
Let’s dive in …
*** The Big 12 doesn’t make sense for Arizona and Arizona State from a competitive standpoint.
For all but a handful of football and men’s basketball teams, recruiting is geography: The program’s center of gravity is the largest talent base within the conference footprint.
For Arizona and ASU, that center is Southern California: 370 miles away, stocked with alums of both schools, culturally similar to Tempe and Tucson and loaded with talent like no place else.
But join the Big 12, and the Arizona schools would have more difficulty luring prospects out of the L.A. basin. The appeal of playing in the same conference as USC and UCLA would vanish.
The center of gravity for the Wildcats and Sun Devils would shift two times zones to the east, to the Dallas Metroplex: 1,110 miles from Phoenix, not as comparable culturally — in many regards, foreign territory.
The Arizona schools would be outsiders recruiting against Texas, Oklahoma, Texas A&M and TCU, not to mention LSU, Alabama, Georgia, Michigan, Ohio State and Notre Dame.
Their Southern California pipeline reduced to a trickle, the Wildcats and Sun Devils would be left to rely on Lone Star scraps.
Good luck with that .
The current situation, with a solid presence in Southern California and a toe-dip in Texas, is far more conducive to building competitive rosters.
Oh, and let’s not forget the Olympic sports component.
If nothing else, the Pac-12 possesses the top Olympic sports in the country — an ideal competitive landscape for hundreds of ASU and Arizona athletes, many of whom grew up in, ahem, Southern California.
The Pac-12 makes far more sense from an expense and logistics standpoint. Most of the Pac-12 campuses are closer to Phoenix and Tucson than any of the Big 12 counterparts.
Schlepping dozens of teams to the central and southern Plains — not to mention Ames and Morgantown — is decidedly suboptimal in matters of time and cost.
*** It doesn’t make sense for Arizona and Arizona State from an academic standpoint.
Academic association might not matter to fans (or coaches), but it matters to the voices that matter … to the presidents and the regents and the pols.
Which conference offers more prestige on that front:
The Pac-12, which has four schools ranked in the U.S. News top-25 (Stanford, Cal, USC and UCLA), or the Big 12, which has none in the top 50?
And if the U.S. News ranking isn’t your thing, consider the conference ties to the prestigious (in academia) Association of American Universities:
The Pac-12 has eight members in the AAU; the Big 12 has three.
The guess here is Arizona president Robert Robbins, the founding director of the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute, and Arizona State president Michael Crow, who has spent years raising ASU’s academic profile — and is commissioner Larry Scott’s staunchest supporter — would prefer academic alignment with California’s powerhouse universities.
And so would the Arizona Board of Regents.
*** It doesn’t make sense for the Big 12.
Let’s not forget that realignment requires a willing suitor.
Assuming the Arizona schools are a package deal — Tucson is well-represented on the Board of Regents — it’s difficult to envision a scenario in which the Big 12 benefits financially by adding both schools.
Think about the last wave of realignment at the Power Five level:
Utah and Colorado to the Pac-12.Rutgers, Maryland and Nebraska to the Big Ten.Missouri and Texas A&M to the SEC.West Virginia and TCU to the Big 12.Louisville, Syracuse and Pittsburgh to the ACC.
Notice something? In no case did a conference invite two schools from the same state: The math don’t work.
Why would the Big 12 only add one major market (Phoenix) but split the revenue pie two additional ways?
Because neither Arizona school brings a major football brand to the table — sorry, Wildcats: basketball doesn’t matter — there’s no way the Wildcats and Sun Devils could pay for themselves and increase the size of the revenue pie for everyone else.
There’s also the matter of timing.
It makes less-than-zero sense for the Big 12 to expand during the remaining years of its current Tier I deal with ESPN because the parties removed the contractual mandate that required ESPN to increase the rights fee if the conference expanded.

In other words, a 12-school Big 12 would have to divide with a 10-school ESPN revenue pie.
But there’s also a problem with delaying expansion until the current Tier I deals terminate: They expire on different schedules (spring of ’24 for the Pac-12, spring of ’25 for the Big 12).
Would the Arizona schools contractually commit to the Pac-12’s new deal with ESPN or Fox, Facebook or Amazon, then leave after 12 months and absorb years of massive financial penalties?
No chance. Ain’t happening … for so many reasons.
But what might happen?
The Hotline has long believed the best move for the Pac-12 and the Big 12 might be to combine forces and create a football scheduling alliance.
At the negotiating table, content rules:
An alliance would create premium inventory — the conferences could include a predetermined number of annual cross-over games — and it would fill every kickoff window from 12 p.m. Eastern to 10:30 p.m. Eastern.
The specifics of the arrangement can be left for another day. Or year. For now, let’s be cognizant of the big-picture forces that spark realignment … or maintain the status quo.

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